You Found This Book
by xXSpiritKeeperXx
Summary: The End is leaking, the land is dying. One who lived before saw the future. The darkness was - is - rising. The power of the End is a fickle thing, only love can fight it, but only one can win. Is the lure of the darkness too strong? Will love fall; will the land succumb to the ever approaching death-dream? He is love... he is the Player. He is Steve. T for realism/mild violence.
1. Prologue

I guess it's pretty obvious that Nanite Free has been discontinued. |D;; It's full of loopholes and it'd be too hard to fix so I'm just rewriting the entire thing. But believe me, it looks GREAT so far, and much improved! :D

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You found this book.

You, of all people...?

No matter.

I have seen the future; I knew you would come.

The darkness is rising.

The... Ender... has corrupted me. I can feel it in my bones. These _Pearls_, the gems of the Ender-men, leak their power into other living things. They steal their life force. I throw one, and as it takes me to its landing place I instantly feel a weakening of my soul... But that does not matter now. Nothing matters now. I am taking too long...

The power of the End, of the final limbo of the death-dream, draws us all towards it. While life is a beautiful lie, no matter how many times I find myself awake in my bed after seeing the cold bones of Skeletons or lying prone with the reek of rotten flesh in my nostrils, I know that this _respawning_ cannot go on forever. The Ender is leaking into this world, bit by bit. The death-dream is a painful truth.

I _see_ things now. Things in their true form. I see the future. I see the past. I see the Void, and strange lights and whispers of the forgotten, things I am not meant to see. My skin is becoming streaked and swirled with black, my eyes flicker purple. I am now too tall to fit through my door. My wolf attacked me. My animals flee. I am becoming one of them, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. My dream is over.

You, however...

There is a dark, fiendish creature in the End. It flies on rotten wings and its eyes glow with the souls of the death-dreaming. It destroys all of this world and the Nether-world, save for the blackest Obsidian, the impenetrable Granite and the teeth-yellow Stone of its foul realm.

Destroy it.

Destroy the monster, then the souls may be free.

Beware ones like me.

Ones that are black, and whose eyes glow with their souls.

Kill us.

Save us.

I must go now, my time here is done. Do not let this be in vain.

Your journey is only jus

...

*The rest of the text is illegible*


	2. The Newborn

I decided that I shall make this a full story! Hooray! Don't worry, anyone reading Nanite Free, I'll update it. Soon. Promise. also, I have a tendency to start my stories like this (look at the intro here blegh), I SHOULD STOP

Anyway, enjoy!

**-  
Achievement get!**  
**Disclaimer!  
**_-_

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_Chapter One: The Newborn_

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_This darkness... It's cold..._

**Give it a body, again.**

_A body? Again..._

**Yes. Player...**

_Player... Am I the Player...?_

**Use its name.**

_Its name? I have a name?_

**Steve. Player of games.**

_Steve... My name is Steve..._

**Good.**

_I like it..._

**Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air.**

_This tingling and pulling and expanding and contracting..._

**Respawn in the long dream. There you are.**

_Respawn..._

**You. You. You are alive.**

_I am alive_

**Sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees.**

_The forests..._

**Sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the light that fell from the crisp night sky of winter, where a fleck of light in the corner of the player's eye might be a star a million times as massive as the sun, boiling its planets to plasma in order to be visible for a moment to the player, walking home at the far side of the universe, suddenly smelling food, almost at the familiar door, about to dream again.**

_The snowy taiga...my home, my wolv... wo... that would be nice..._

**and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the zeros and ones, through the electricity of the world, through the scrolling words on a screen at the end of a dream**

_In the binary of life_

**and the universe said everything you need is within you**

_Everything I need is within me_

**and the universe said you are stronger than you know**

_I am stronger than I know_

**and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you**

_The darkness I fight_

**and the universe said the light you seek is within you**

_The light I seek_

**And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.**

_I am love?_

**You are the player.**

_I am love. I am the player. I am Steve._

**Wake up.**

xXxXx

The sea crashed against rocky cliffs, throwing up clouds of spray. The roaring of the water in half-filled water worn caverns below the island echoed its sound like a great beast, claiming the island for itself. The grasses blew lazily up above, reaching their proud, sharp blades into the sun, bending benignly with the wind. The trees spoke to each other in whispers, the reaching branches providing shelter for woodpeckers and insects above, and a lone wolf below, settling down to sleep hidden in a bush beneath the tallest tree in the forest for the daytime. Sheep and cattle and swine grazed in the plain, as lazy as the grasses themselves. And deep below, in the caverns where not a ray of sunlight had ever reached, were fell creatures of the night, bones clanking in the cold wet air and festering flesh hanging off limbs.

In the first crying gasp of life, a man arched his back against a sandy beach, his wracking coughs and sobs jump-starting his lungs into the first of uncountable breaths they were bound to take. He wore nothing but a faded blue shirt and dark blue leggings, skin bare and soft and brown hair close-cropped and short, his vivid green eyes starting to water from the instinctual response, putting a sparkling, blurring sheen over everything he saw.

The swine pricked their ears and squinted over the hill. This was not normal. And nothing not normal ever brought any good, they thought, remembering the rolling black hills-in-the-sky that roared and dropped water on their heads and made bolts of fire that once half burned the forest down so they had to huddle in the plains until it went away.

They grunted knowingly to themselves, slowly making their way away from the disturbance, munching grasses as they went.

The man finally finished his coughing fit, his breathing even but slightly ragged. He stared all around him, the ocean sparkling in the sunlight, pristine waters turning dark lapis blue the further under he looked. He noted the trees, the oak- and birch-wood forest uphill, the limestone-laced cliffs that emerged from the beach in an exponential curve about ten minutes' walk away. And the sky, an empty void that had blue extending upwards forever, going out as far as the eye could see over the ocean, seeming to loom closer and draw him in as he watched, making him fall upwards, fall and fall and fall...

The man pushed himself to his feet on shaky limbs, the coarse sand shifting underneath him. He was overcome with the urge to find shelter from the sky, with its unsettling emptiness. The forest was the closest place to go, and he put one foot in front of the other, rambling at his own pace up to the treeline.

The oaks and birches stood as if guarding a secret within, their straight, branchless trunks grown straight into the air, competing for light. The man felt safer here, away from the omnipresent void of the sky, but the creatures here were as suspicious of change as the swine. The woodpeckers nearby held their beaks, the insects ceased chirping.

A sharp, warm feeling came to the man's attention. He looked down; there were patchy red footprints following him back the way he'd come. He sank to the grassy forest floor and turned his feet soles up; sharp grasses and pieces of flint had nicked, scratched and slashed his feet, leaving small, red lacerations along his soles. He needed protection.

The man walked to where he thought the edge of the forest was, mindful of his injuries but pressing onwards anyway. The pain was not so bad, as he got used to it. Soon the trees gave way to an open, grassy plain instead of the remembered shoreline, cattle spotted here and there, with swine and even some sheep. The man stood under the last white birch tree before the grass, still scared of the sky. The cattle were large and the hides were thick and tough, he could tell by the way they were tugged along their bodies and resisted wrinkling. Perhaps he could fashion himself a pair of shoes from the skin.

But how would he kill it?

The man remembered his feet, and retraced his steps. If he could find a large enough piece of flint, perhaps he could maul the creature to death. With a tugging upwards of the corners of his lips he remembered the right way, heading back towards the shoreline. Where the sand turned into soil there was an abundance of gravel, many pieces of flint jutting out here and there. The pieces were all very sharp, but not a single one was larger than the top two joints of his index finger, making them next to useless for the intended purpose. The trees were much more inviting, though. Perhaps he could carve a blade from a log.

xXxXx

The logs of the birch trees proved surprisingly easy to attack with the flint; it chipped and cut fairly cleanly against the grain. The man had managed to fell a whole tree and gather four, but it was backbreaking work. The pieces were then broken into planks using the flint – the wood once again proving more fragile than it should have been. The price was paid as the sharp rocks bit into his palms and made more thin, jagged lines to mar his skin.

It was now late afternoon, and with a long sharpened plank thanks to a few pieces of flint, the man had an adequate weapon. The cows and plains wouldn't move, so the man gathered up the wood in his own sweet time and stashed them under a bush, confident that he would remember that one massive tree nearby that actually _did_ have branches, as large as the trunk itself. It was the third-tallest one as far as he could see through a gap in the canopy.

The man followed his path back to the plains, looking at the sky nervously once before keeping his eyes straight ahead and marching towards the cattle. They stayed put, unaware of the danger.

The man looked at the animal closely. Its legs were thin. Its neck looked strong. The legs would be the first target, then.

The plank was studied, and finding the sharpest part, the man swung it at the cow's knee.

The cow shrieked and kicked at the man, stamping the ground in circles and almost trampling him. The other cattle stampeded and ran away leaving clumps of dirt and grass in their wake. The man cried out at the blossoming pain in his chest, but swung the plank again and again, hacking a gash in the cow's side and taking out two of its knees. The cow whined with its balance upset, crashing to its side in the grass and lying still. It did not bleed.

The man fell to his knees. His heart was pounding. He gripped the plank so hard his knuckles went white. The pain in his chest was a blossoming wave and a lightning tingle, a single point where the animal had lashed at him. He finally reached out to touch the cow, running his hands over the short, soft hair.

Then the cow disappeared. It just messily disintegrated, leaving behind three good hunks of meat and two face-sized pieces of leather. The man scrambled back in alarm, a wordless cry escaping his throat. When the pieces of materials did not, in fact, disintegrate too, he reached over to pick them up.

In his palm, where he could not see, it flashed pale, pale blue as he picked up the drops and held them, recognising that he could pick them up. Now he had fresh food and leather for his shoes.

But the leather pieces were not quite big enough.

The hacking process was repeated with another cow, and then another, for he only got a single piece of leather from the second one. At the end of the killing he had five pieces of leather and six pieces of meat, and the sun was going down.

The sun blazed at him, turning the sky blood red, tiny pinpricks of white light beginning to twinkle in the void. The man sprinted back the way he had come, even more terrified of the sky now that it had eyes to watch him with. He didn't stop until he got to the bush with his logs and planks, putting all his items together in a messy heap and hiding himself well within the branches and leaves.

Then he heard a clanking from not too far off. It was a hollow kind of clanking, echoing in the silence. Not even the insects chirped now.

The fell creatures were rising.

A moan was heard, slightly closer, as particles of the earth rose up and bound themselves together in an entirely new form, a green, decaying human, once the spitting image of the man. The leaves reworked themselves in the trees, dropping snarling green monstrosities to the forest floor. They hissed at the skeletons, at the zombies. Giant spiders stalked the earth and the upper canopy, almost but not quite ever making it close enough to smell the man, who couldn't have been more terrified. He didn't make a single noise, except to slowly eat his way through the hunks of raw meat. Slowly, slowly, the pains started to ease through the night as shrieks and hisses and chirps continued their ways.

Then, in the dark before the dawn, one last creature rose up in the plains. Its tall body did not show up in the night, its black skin seeming to draw and exude the night. Its eyes glowed ethereal purple with some force from deep within, the same force swirling off in tendrils, grasping at the air, stroking it. It jerked its head.

The entire world paused as it looked, squinted, _scrutinised_ its domain.

_Something was different tonight._

There was a new soul on the island.

And then it growled, low and guttural, rising into a shriek that rent the air and caused the man, lying so many blocks away hidden and safe under the bushes, to shiver and quake. And at that moment, the sun shone the first rays of light over the island, the undead bursting into flame, the creepers disappearing down caves, the spiders tamed by the light.

The Enderman teleported in a burst of violet energy.

And the man, so shaken by this night, lay under the bushes for a long while.

xXxXx

The sun was high in the sky when he slowly crawled out of hiding. His meat was eaten and his cuts healed. Sunlight streamed through the canopy, dappling sweetly on the floor. There were bones, arrows and rotting flesh lying about, half-hidden and unwanted, the 'drops' of the disintegrated undead.

The man was struck by sudden inspiration, putting the planks together to make a bench to work on. They gripped to themselves, seemingly happy with their placements, to form a permanent structure. The man then went to work on the bench, occasionally putting his feet up so he could get measurements, folding and pressing the hide together to make a pair of boots. A sword came next, the planks sharpened extremely fine, with a hilt and handle of broken-up, sticklike planks. He could make four from two planks, and they served the purpose well.

The weapon and boots were equipped, the items packed up and stashed under the bush.

_Who am I?_ thought the man as he shimmied up a tree to get a good look from above. _Why am I here?_

And then the universe spoke to him.

And the universe told him.

"I am love," the man said, finally getting to the top of the trees, seeing that the sky was benign, that the blue was calming, that the white clouds were fluffy and soft, that the sun was ready to light his path forwards.

"I am love. I am the Player."

And the universe gave him knowledge of how to survive on the flesh of the cattle and swine, the knowledge of how to mine stone for himself, knowledge of how to catch fish and how to build. And the universe said _I love you_, and the Player smiled.

"I am Steve."


End file.
